You know, I’m still not sure any of those bullets actually penetrated Beef’s body. Of course, I imagine the impact of a bullet could do some pretty serious damage even without penetrating the body – I’m wondering if she just beat Beef to death with bullets.

I bet we can figure that out, given a few data points. (Disclaimer: I’m not Randall Munroe, and I’m no expert in weapons, physics, or baseball. Some of this is probably screwed up. I just like pulling data from mostly-accurate sources and plugging it into semi-understood formulas to overanalyze webcomics.) Let’s do this.

First we need to know what that gun is. Daisy’s been repeatedly firing with one hand, so it’s semi-automatic and probably doesn’t have a ton of recoil. SEMME was backed by the government, so let’s assume it’s a standard issue 9mm service pistol.

That would mean she’s firing off 9x19mm rounds. There are many different cartridges this size, but a middle-of-the-pack example from the Wikipedia page says it should have a 124 gram bullet with a muzzle velocity of 1300 ft/s. (We’re ignoring air resistance because of the short distance and for simplicity.) That works out to 630 Joules of energy, applied to 63.62 square millimeters (a circle 9mm in diameter), repeated at least six times. That’s 9.91 Joules of energy per square millimeter.

For comparison, we can assume Jason’s firing the same ammunition. Look what just one did to Penny’s baseline human skull.

Just for fun, let’s see what the numbers look like for Tony’s desk attack earlier.

Tony’s 5’8″ and 170 pounds according to Walkypedia. I’m a little taller than that, but by guessing with a tape measure I think that desk needs to be 24 inches deep by 60 inches long for him to hold it like that. I found a solid wood “compact executive desk” that size, which weighs 200 pounds.

According to a few random sources, hitters in the MLB can swing bats anywhere between 60 and 80 MPH. Let’s say Tony’s swinging the desk at 70 MPH.

Tony’s also jumping through the air with the desk, but how fast is he going? He doesn’t have Robin’s super speed, but his abductee strength should let him get moving quickly. Let’s say he can accelerate like a trained athlete. Usain Bolt took 1.85 seconds to run the first 10 meters of a race from a dead stop at the 2008 Olympics, working out to 12 MPH. Let’s say Tony’s running leap with the desk was at 8 MPH.

Let’s use a pre-made calculator to figure out how much energy all this moving stuff should have, because I’m lazy.

Desk @ 70 MPH = 44,417.5 Joules
Desk + Tony @ 8 MPH = 1073.27 Joules

Now, that’s all the kinetic energy in them both, assuming Tony and the desk somehow came to a dead stop immediately like those swinging clacky-ball executive toys. The swing had follow-through and Tony was probably still moving when he landed. Let’s guess the post-impact swing was 50 MPH and he landed at 4 MPH. So post-impact they still have:

Desk @ 50 MPH = 22662 Joules
Desk + Tony @ 4 MPH = 268.318 Joules

Leaving us with 22,560.452 Joules of energy transferred to Beef’s face. But spread over how much surface area? That’s ambiguous.

If the impact site was the size of a CD-ROM (11,309.73 sq. mm), that’s 2 Joules per millimeter. That’s a lot less than 9.91. [citation needed]

If it’s the size of a fist (approx. 4500 sq. mm), that’s 5 Joules per square millimeter. Still half of the pressure exerted by the bullet.

Either way, the hit was enough to stun Beef long enough for Tony to beat the crap out of him, but even after all that he got back up again anyway.

Conclusion: Super-strength abductees can tank blunt force trauma, but are still weak to firearms.

Daisy at least had the excuse of being brainwashed though- Jason is unflinchingly shooting Penny in the face. It’s just not the kind of thing you expect the characters to do, even if they deserve it. Quite a tonal shift is all.

Shooting a serial killer in the head when they came in murdering people, gloated about murdering you, and now are literally in the process of slicing open your close friend – and yet still looking unhappy about it afterward – is cold?

Man, I wonder how you would describe somebody who actually set out to kill a villain, like Inigo Montoya or Luke Skywalker?

Beef was a traitor, but I feel sorry for him. Finding out that his biological parents are dead and then his adoptive parents started to ignore him when Sal showed up (though that’s pretty much Linda’s fault), that sure made him snap.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by mentioning a brief post-IW forum fan fic that somebody wrote and which stayed with me for quite some time. It’s about different characters reflecting on the ending events, and one in particular visits Beef’s grave…

It was really good, as I remember it.

Willis is pointing out the flaws and shortcomings of IW in this commentary, but in any case, the characters were never flat.

Over the years, I’ve thrown a batch of ideas at Willis or in the general direction of his universe, some of which I eventually turned into guest content.

One of them that I did not pick up was a bit of a coda for Daisy here: in the days after Robin and Leslie’s split and before Malaya, I suggested that a version of Daisy– seemingly healed on the surface but not fully healed underneath– might end up being Leslie’s rebound relationship.

Sharing Robin’s war-hero status would give Daisy that larger-than-life quality that leads Les to fantasize about Leia and Starbuck and such, but even before this traumatic episode, she had almost none of Robin’s frivolity (a mild giggle at Jason’s Hawaiian outfit was as far as she’d go). And in this telling, Daisy would’ve spent some time in counseling addressing this horrible day, as opposed to Robin, who basically denied she had any real issues until they blew up.

But Daisy would’ve overestimated how “handled” and “managed” her emotional scars really were. And relationships can’t go anywhere if EITHER party has a problem with trust. Leslie, to her own surprise, would find it in herself to trust Daisy, but…

Woulda been interesting, maybe, but introducing Malaya was ultimately a better option. The temptation to look backward too much is a dangerous one for cartoonists. And while this kind of parallels Mandy and Grace’s end in that here’s another lesbian whose humanity is emphasized by unjust suffering, it’s still probably the strongest note for this minor character to go out on.

Daisy’s Dumbing of Age incarnation is so drastically different, she almost reads like a karmic apology to the raw deal this one got.